What is Cold Fusion

Cold Fusion is a Web application development tool for people who want to use the Web to create dynamic-page applications and interactive Web sites on corporate intranets and the Internet. Cold Fusion gives developers a way to quickly build powerful Web applications which integrate with key server technologies such as relational databases and SMTP e-mail.

Cold Fusion is a technology that is much more difficult to host than simple static web pages. Zid.Com has been developing and hosting CF sites since 1996. Zid.Com is also a member of the allaire alliance, hosting partner.

No. Since Cold Fusion integrates its special coding with normal HTML codes, any standard web authoring tool that allows editing of HTML can be used. This means that all development and debugging of a Cold Fusion application can take place right on Zid.Com's servers. However, if you plan to do heavy development work with Cold Fusion, you may find it easier to purchase a copy of Cold Fusion to do all your development locally, and only copy the finished product to our servers. Allaire also has a new product called Studio that integrates HTML coding with Cold Fusion coding and remote "one-button" publishing. It's a very nice tool to have.

No. However, see previous question.

You can use any ODBC-compliant database such as FoxPro, Access, Paradox, etc. Zid.Com also provides its clients with Microsoft SQL Server if requested (additional setup and monthly charges are involved). Please contact info@zid.com for help in setting up your databases.

All our newest servers currently use version 4.5.1 Zid.Com is comitted to always providing the latest production version of Cold Fusion on its servers. Older servers still have ColdFusion 3.1. If you are a customer on a 3.1 server and you must have version 4.5.1, please contact support@zid.com.

Yes, we support both CFX tags and CFFile tags. Several CFX tags are currently available on our servers. If there is a tag you would like us to include, contact info@zid.com. We will examine each tag for stability before using on our servers and we do reserve the right to not load any tags we feel may compromise the stability of our systems.

We also allow CFFILE. However, we need all our users to let us know if they will be using this facility.

You can use any ODBC-compliant database such as FoxPro, Access, Paradox, etc. Zid.Com also provides its clients with Microsoft SQL Server if requested (additional setup and monthly charges are involved). Please contact info@zid.com for help in setting up your databases.

No. Because of the way Cold Fusion accesses ODBC databases, you will often be unable to copy over a database. More importantly, your database is 'live,' meaning there is a constant possibility someone will try to access your database while you are copying over your new database. This can often lead to a corrupted database.

To get around these issues, we ask all clients to copy any new databases to the server under a different name than the active database. Once copied, they should either email info@zid.com.

Yes, we support all released fuel packs, Crystal Report Writer and Cold Fusion's Java Classes.

You can use both in your website, although not easily on the same page . They serve the same purpose of creating dynamic web content and they both have the same functionality either through their core language base or via DLL extensions that allow one to fill in missing functionality. Cold Fusion tends to be easier and faster to program in than ASP.

Due to security reasons, Zid.Com is unable to provide Cold Fusion Studio RDS support, however, the FTP functionality will work.